The invention relates to an adapter comprising a housing preferably made of plastic, which housing contains at least one carrier formed from a flexible material and provided with at least electrical conductive pathways, which conductive pathways are electrically connected to at least one terminal of the adapter.
Such an adapter is known from U.S. Pat. No. 4,595,839. In general, such adapters are used in communication connections by means of cables. These adapters can serve various purposes. In general, they are used for adapting an electrical connection designed to a particular specification and/or having certain characteristics to the specification and/or characteristics of another connection. One particular connector specification can thus be converted to another. It is also possible for the adapter to be provided with electronic devices for matching impedance levels to each other.
In practice, at least one side of the adapter is provided with a connector which is designed to be able to interact with a mating connector. In most applications for (tele)communications, this connector is provided with at least two parallel rows of conducting terminal connections which have either a "female" or a "male" structure and are designed to interact with the terminal connections which are provided in the mating connector, but are of complementary type. Such a connector connection can comply with, for example, the RS232 standard.
In the adapter known from U.S. Pat. No. 4,595,839 the electrical conductive pathways on the carrier make electrical contact with the terminal connections in the connector. In the known adapter the flexible carrier is only used as a substitute for separate cable connections as to reduce the space within the adapter needed by the electrical wiring. Electronic components within the adapter are arranged on separate printed circuit boards being electrically connected to the flexible carrier. Moreover, separate electrical wiring is applied within the adapter to connect the printed circuit boards to a cable being connected to the adapter. Therefore, the adapter as known is rather complex, whereas during assembling many manufacturing steps need to be done by hand.
It is also known per se to form the terminal connections of the connector on the adapter from two rows of resilient conducting connections placed opposite each other, between which a carrier, provided on both sides with contact faces, can be pushed. If the carrier is pushed between such terminal connections, these contact faces make electrically conductive contact with the respective terminal connections on both sides of the carrier. Sometimes, however, one conductive pathway on one side of the carrier has to make electrically conductive contact with a terminal connection situated directly opposite the other side. This is then achieved in practice by using a loose wire, one end of which is connected to the conductive pathway in question, while the other end is connected to the terminal connection concerned. The application of such loose wires in the adapter produces non-reproducible parasitic capacitances and self-inductances, which become more and more of an obstacle as the standards for the transmission speed of information become more stringent. Furthermore, these loose wires complicate the production process because they have to be fitted and soldered by hand. This means that only a semi-automatic production method is possible.